San Francisco - Lyft is expanding its roster of automotive partners as the
second-largest US
ride-hailing company tries to capitalize on missteps by Uber Technologies.
Jaguar
Land Rover said it’s
working with Lyft on autonomous-driving technology and will offer vehicles for
rent to the San Francisco-based startup’s drivers. The automaker, which is a
subsidiary of Tata Motors, also disclosed an investment of $25 million in Lyft
as part of a funding round that closed in April, valuing the business at $7.5
billion.
The investment shows automakers are hedging their bets in
the competitive ride-hailing market. Tata Group, which owns Tata Motors and
Jaguar, previously invested at least $100 million in Uber, and they formed a
financing partnership in India
last year.
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General Motors, which is a major Lyft investor and partner,
started working with Uber last year on car-sharing after rolling out a similar
program with Lyft.
Lyft’s partnership with Jaguar comes on the heels of last
month’s surprise announcement that the ride-hailing startup is working with
Alphabet’s Waymo.
The Google sister company is suing Uber over self-driving
car technology, even though Waymo’s parent company is an Uber investor. In
addition to Jaguar and Waymo, Lyft works with GM on autonomous driving projects
and said last week that it struck a similar alliance with start up NuTonomy.
“Different partners have different skill sets, and this is
such a big opportunity,” said John Zimmer, Lyft’s co-founder and president.
“Broadly speaking, it’s going to play out over the next five to ten years, and
it’s critical that we have multiple partners in various spaces and
geographies.”
Uber has allies of its own. The company has agreements with
Daimler AG and Volvo Cars on autonomous technology. It’s also spent hundreds of
millions on self-driving technology developed in-house, which is currently
being tested with customers on public roads.
How self-driving cars will be deployed in the coming decades
is ill-defined. Ride-hailing companies like Lyft,
India’s Ola, China’s
Didi Chuxing or Uber could one day buy their own autonomous vehicles, share
profits with self-driving technology makers that operate cars on their networks
or face competition from new autonomous ride-hailing systems.
For example, Tesla’s Elon Musk has expressed interest in
creating such a service for his customers.“We think this is a really long
game,” Zimmer said. “I used to run the mile. The mile is a four-lap race, and
we might be in lap two.”
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